Coming off turn two, cars 98 and 47 make contact. A white Ford Thunderbird — No. 47 — spins out. The back end comes around. The car crosses the track.

He slides sideways through a wall of oncoming cars. The right front tire is flat and smoking.

Billy Standridge heads for the pit.

The salvage business

Standridge worked in salvage yards since age 14. Pulling car-buretors, alternators and batter-ies was his thing. He paid $20 for his first car, a Ford Fairlane he found in a field.

“I towed it home, fixed it up and raced it at the Shadyside Drag Strip,” he said.

And he followed the greats of NASCAR, like Richard Petty and Junior Johnson.

“I met Ralph Earnhardt when I was a teenager,” he said.

In 1973, he bought some land on Sulphur Springs Road south of Shelby and built his own sal-vage shop. Not long after, he built a racecar and began racing at local dirt tracks in Cleveland County.

“It was just a hobby,” he said, “I wanted to stay away from rac-ing until my salvage business was established.”

Off to the races

By his mid-20s, Standridge’s salvage business was growing. He built what he called his first real racecar and entered it in the Daytona Dash Series.

“We had a fuel problem in the initial part of that race,” he said.

The racer didn’t win that day in Daytona. The following year, Standridge entered the race again.

This time, he won.

Standridge was hooked. He was a success both on and off the track.

“My salvage business was do-ing well,” he said.

He continued to race, competing against the likes of Dale Earnhardt, Mike Skinner and John Andretti.

“Earnhardt stuck me to a wall at Bristol,” he said. “He hit me so hard it buckled my seat.”

Hitting another wall

While running a practice race at the Charlotte Motor Speedway — driving one of the fastest cars on the track — the race went bad for Standridge.

“In the last lap of qualifying, “I spun out and hit the wall in Turn Three,” he said.

Standridge broke his leg.

Back home in Shelby, his leg and car crumpled, Standridge agonized over getting his racecar fixed and back on the track.

“I was wondering how I was going to get it fixed and back rac-ing, the pain was too much, I went home to bed,” he remem-bered.

In 1998, Standridge was racing again in Daytona.

“I was back in the same race I had broken my leg in the year before,” he said, “and then John Andretti bumped me.”

The rub spun him to the inside of the track, pushing him back to ninth place.

“Dale Earnhardt won the race,” he said.

The race ends

Standridge ran three more races after the setback in Daytona.

In 1999, he was again back on the track.

Then, NASCAR changed the rules on the car’s spoilers.

“The new rules hindered my car from performing as well as it should,” he said. “Racing was done. It was over.”

Standridge, 58, now splits his time between home and his of-fice at Standridge Auto and Truck Parts in Shelby.

The racer brought out the first caution flag of the day at Talla-dega’s Diehard 500 back in 1997 when his car made contact with another, sending him to the pit. And his love for the sport has always remained.

“I still get fan mail,” he said. “And people ask me all the time if I would run in a legends race. You never know.”